Beauty Standards In Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray

An entertaining and moralistic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray combines multiple literary elements into a well-written novel with underlying ideas about the inherency of evil and its roots. Many prominent literary themes stand out throughout the novel, but the most common and prominent ones remain: “man vs. self” and “man vs.society”. Throughout the story, the questions of moral values such as the creation of evil and the importance of beauty standards in society appear frequently and are questioned deeply within the story line. The novel remains a telling tale of the dangers of wishing to conform to beauty standards and the over importance that society places on the concept of beauty, which could allow evil to form in the hearts of the most beautiful. Throughout the novel, we follow along the story line of a beautiful man by the name of Dorian Gray. It is understood almost immediately upon introducing him into the novel, that he is considered beautiful by society and is therefore paid attention to and …show more content…
In Oscar Wilde’s unique point of view, we learn the vices that beauty has on those who possess attractive features and what happens when they are combined with the realization of their special treatment and without fear of age or morals changing their features. The novel explores the idea of what would happen if someone were to realize such power, and as such he ends up ruining the lives of the people around him and ended his own life in his own madness and paranoia due to his own beauty. The novel is able to explore the dangers of society’s treatment of the attractive and the intense pressure that is placed on them to look beautiful all the time, and what would happen if this pressure were prolonged, which inevitably ends in